Pick Up Life Where it is Broken

I confess. I am a genealogy nerd. I have been researching my family tree for about twenty years. The thing that I love the most about doing this is the little stories I discover and sometimes the little artifacts I find. One of my most treasured finds is a letter written by my great-grandmother.


My grandparents were killed in a traffic accident in 1961. They left behind my mother and her sister who were both adults and married, as well as my Uncle Mitch who was a young teenager. My great-grandmother wrote them a letter to try to comfort them in their grief. I have a copy of that letter, and I treasure it for its simplicity and power.

She opened the letter with this sentence, “My heart is breaking with sorrow, and I don’t know what to say except to pick up life where it is broken, and try to live a life worthy of the parents who have gone before.”

My great-grandmother’s advice to “pick up life where it is broken” was not a simple platitude. She had experienced many times of picking up her own life. When she was a eight years old, her mother died in childbirth, and she was left to help take care of the household and mother her siblings. This was the 1880’s, and her life was not easy. Her family moved around from Kentucky to Missouri and finally to Oklahoma to homestead.

She met her future husband in Oklahoma, and together they homesteaded. They were original Sooners, having participated in the land run in 1890’s. She lost a four year old son to an infection. She watched another son, my grandfather, go off to fight in World War I. She lived through the Great Depression.

When she wrote this letter, she was suffering the greatest grief a mother could know-the death of her child. Yet, she reached out to comfort her grandchildren with her own simple words born of experience-“Pick up life where it is broken.”

I’ve heard a story of my great-grandmother her that shows what she was made of. She had been told by a doctor that she was dying. The family took a final family trip to Pike’s Peak. When they returned, she announced, “I’m not going to die.” She ended up living into her nineties.

Recently, I’ve been undergoing my own trials. In May, my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. The day he was diagnosed, I re-read that letter. I had always treasured that letter for its history and beauty, but that day I felt like my great grandmother reached out from the past to comfort me and advise me. I knew that I needed to “pick up life where it is broken.” I had to keep moving forward.

In the months since the diagnosis, life has at times been difficult. I have often felt like giving up, but I know that I can’t do that. I have to, as a good friend likes to say, “keep plugging away.” I’m so grateful for the legacy I have from my great-grandmother, and for the advice that she left for me. I hope that I’ve inherited a bit of the resilience that she had, and that I can keep picking up life where it is broken, and leave that legacy for my own child.